Articles

Potpourri - assortment: a collection containing a variety of sorts of things; a jar of mixed flower petals and spices used as perfume.

Every month for years I have wanted to just report some of the current scientific findings that are being published by evolutionists and that would be of interest to us all. These findings illustrate how evolutionists either misinterpret the data, or make up fairy tales for adults to whitewash over the obvious abundance of materials that are being found and that refute evolutionary theories.

Well, this month I am going to do a little of that and I would like to have your reactions in order to know if you would like to have more of this kind of information and insight in future newsletters.

The following quoted examples come from the highly evolutionary digest publication Science News.

(Does it really take millions of years to get petrified wood?)

Materials scientists have turned wood into stone, mimicking in a single workweek a natural petrification process that takes millions of years. In the January Advanced Materials, Yongsoon Shin and his colleagues at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, share their recipe. They first soak blocks of pine and poplar in an acid bath to remove lignin, a gluelike substance in the wood, and then move them into a solution containing mineral-forming silica. Next, the team heats the dried, silica-infused wood to 1,400 degrees Celsius in an argon-filled furnace. The process binds silica to the carbon in wood's cellulose. The tough, heat-resistant, highly porous silicon carbide ceramic might soak up radioactive waste or remove carbon dioxide from smokestacks, says Shin. [Emphasis added] Reported February 5, 2005

It seems to me that this process would be similar to what we would have expected wood from some trees to have endured during and after the Flood of Noah. Billions of trees were blown over by thousands of volcanoes at the beginning of the Flood. The acids, heat and silica (and even Argon) in those volcanic emissions would have buried some of those trees in wet hot mud layers that sound a lot like the conditions stipulated by the researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The process would have taken weeks or months rather than one day simply because the temperatures were lower, only in the 100 to 500 degree Celsius range.

(Look what we found!)

Two nearly complete sets of fossilized animal remains from 130-million-year-old rocks in China are revealing fresh details about the size and dietary habits of ancient mammals. The newly described finds counter the common presumption that such creatures remained small and ecologically suppressed until dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago.

The fossils were unearthed from volcanic ash laid down by an ancient eruption. Many of the entombed animals have been preserved in their original three-dimensional forms, says Jin Meng, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The larger of the two finds, a 1-meter long mammal dubbed Repenomamus giganticus, had a stout build and squat posture like that of modern-day badgers. . . . He and his colleagues, who describe the fossils in the Jan. 13 Nature, estimate that R. giganticus weighed between 12 and 14 kilograms, which makes the species the largest mammal known to have lived during the 170-million-year reign of the dinosaurs.

The other set of remains - in some ways, the more astounding one - is a nearly complete specimen of Repenomamus robustus, a smaller cousin of R. giganticus. This opossum-size species was first described from fragmentary remains about 5 years ago.

Within the well-preserved rib cage of the new specimen, the researchers found a compact wad of broken bones and teeth. Some of these remains, including a skull, spinal column, and limb bones derive from prey that had been dismembered and swallowed in chunks. Comparisons with known fossils suggest that those fragments belong to a hand-length hatchling of a Psittacosaurus, a common plant-eating dinosaur that grew to a length of around 2 meters.

The newfound Repenomamus fossils are challenging the popular notion that the mammals that lived side by side with dinosaurs generally were as small as shrews and ecologically marginalized, says Anne Weil, a paleontologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. . . .

The dinosaur-as-prey scenario upsets another long-held paleontological contention by suggesting that predatory mammals may have influenced dinosaur evolution. For example, says Weil, some feathered dinosaur contemporaries of Repenomamus over time became smaller - and thus presumably better equipped to fly or escape predation. At the same time, some midsize dinosaurs were becoming larger in perhaps another evolutionary response to mammalian predation. [Emphasis added] Reported January 15, 2005

This article is so juicy that it is almost hard to know where to start.

First, please notice how often faith and belief statements are used throughout the text of the article.

Second, please notice the storytelling episode in the last paragraph. Evolutionists can always spin a story to fit whatever they want it to support. Here we are told that mammals that were thought not to have existed at the time were, in fact, responsible for the evolution of dinosaurs into birds and into larger dinosaur species - at the same time! What about those species that neither got bigger nor smaller at that supposed era of time?

Third, please notice that the more we dig, the more we find out that all animal and plant species lived at the same time, not different times as evolutionists try to defend. I fully believe that the more we dig the more likely we are to find larger and larger mammal remains buried with dinosaurs. What are they going to say then?

Fourth, please notice that the fossil physical evidence that evolutionists tout as being proof of their position is, in fact, the very evidence that will ultimately destroy their faith based system.

Fifth, please notice that if the creature looked like modern-day badgers maybe that is because it is a modern-day badger that was simply buried in Noah's Flood about 4,500 years ago. The remains were found buried so rapidly in volcanic ash that they were buried in their upright position; and, thousands of volcanoes erupted catastrophically at the beginning of the Flood.

Sixth, please notice that what evolutionists have are common presumptions, popular notions and long-held contentions. What they lack are stone-cold hard facts.

(Here we have another computer model being used to try to prove evolution true.)

The pulse of the real estate market in a given area turns out to be a powerful indicator of how many exotic plant species have invaded the neighborhood, say two researchers. The hotter the market, the greater the risk to native species from invaders, according to their computer models.

Adding economic factors to a simpler model of alien-plant invasion enhanced the model's predictive power, report Brad W. Taylor of [the] U. of Wyoming in Laramie and Rebecca Irwin of Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., in the Dec. 21, 2004 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Emphasis added] Reported January 8, 2005

The total improvement from the simpler to the more complex computer model was from 68% to 75%. While a significant increase, this increase is not far off from a normal margin of error. Besides, what did all this prove? Nothing!

Did it prove that this is what happens in nature? No. Did it prove that living plants have intelligence and understand real estate markets and the importance of making good land investments? No. Did it prove that native and exotic plant species do things intentionally and with purpose? No.

Please notice that all three examples cited here are from research laboratories that are funded by American tax payers. Why are we paying these people to invent stories about evolution instead of paying them to do legitimate productive research as God commanded us to do in Genesis?